Essex County Council’s Research and Citizen Insight Team worked with Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI) to develop our understanding of communities across Essex. The work – conducted between March and June 2021 - focused on examining the position of different communities across Essex on a national ‘community needs index’.
This work allows us to compare communities across Essex, assess local communities against national benchmarks, and explore some of the factors that drive different levels of community need in different parts of the county.
OCSI’s work with Essex is based on the use of a bespoke interim 2020-based Community Needs Index designed to capture – as far as possible – changes resulting from the COVID pandemic. This is referred to as the Essex Community Needs Index (ECNI). The ECNI 2020 has not been formally published and as such is badged as ‘experimental statistics’.
The following outputs are published below:
- A Powerpoint pack which sets out a high-level overview of the analysis.
- Project reports prepared by OCSI, covering each of the three project phases:
- Phase 1: to provide a better understanding of community need in Essex, the extent to which Essex is ‘left behind’ and the drivers that contribute towards this.
- Phase 2: to understand the factors that might cause a place to be ‘left behind’
- Phase 3: to understand the impact and effect on communities of those specific places that are ‘left behind’ in Essex, and comparator areas.
- The Phase 1 Essex Community Needs Index (ECNI) dataset
